December 19, 2010

Tracks and trails

Pigeon tracks - magpies' long tails
would leave a drag mark

Last night I watched two young foxes tussling and playing in the snow. It was late, the common was deserted and unlit and had the ground not been white I wouldn't have seen them. That's probably what they were banking on; they let me get quite close, probably assuming themselves to be an invisible as ever. They nosed the snow carefully; one dug away at it with his front paws for a moment, then froze, intent. But no kill. The other followed a scent trail, head down, into the trees.

Cat, dog and people prints

The snow holds scents for longer, so that a trail of footprints is even more vivid to a fox's nose than to its eye. It's the same with my dog; she is distracted, enraptured, by the web of smells around her when I walk her in the snow. For us the clues it gives up are purely visual: the small, neat prints of a cat, the oval pads of a fox, the right-left-right of birds like magpies and pigeons or the hopping marks of a blackbird.

Under the insulating blanket, life goes on. Voles and shrews make little paths between their burrows and winter food stores, or simply to get around and hunt: grass or ground underfoot, snow above. If it lies for any length of time the ghostly runs can sometimes be discerned, for a day or two, when it melts.

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About Me

Melissa Harrison won the John Muir Trust's Wild Writing award in 2010. Her first novel, CLAY, won the Portsmouth First Fiction award. Her second, AT HAWTHORN TIME, was shortlisted for the Costa and longlisted for the Baileys. She writes a Nature Notebook column for The Times and her most recent book is Rain: Four Walks in English Weather.